Fine-grained attention for image caption generation

Abstract

Despite the progress, generating natural language descriptions for images is still a challenging task. Most state-of-the-art methods for solving this problem apply existing deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models to extract a visual representation of the entire image, based on which the parallel structures between images and sentences are exploited using recurrent neural networks. However, there is an inherent drawback that their models may attend to a partial view of a visual element or a conglomeration of several concepts. In this paper, we present a fine-grained attention based model based on a deep recurrent architecture that combines recent advances in computer vision and machine translation. The model contains three sub-networks: a deep recurrent neural network for sentences, a deep convolutional network for images, and a region proposal network for nearly cost-free region proposals. Our model is able to automatically learn to fix its gaze on salient region proposals. The process of generating the next word, given the previously generated ones, is aligned with this visual perception experience. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed model on three benchmark datasets (Flickr 8K, Flickr 30K and MS COCO). The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system.

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Acknowledgments

The research is supported by Science Foundation of The China(Xi’an) Institute for Silk Road Research (2016SY10, 2016SY18), the scientific research program of Shaanxi Provincial Department of Education(2013JK1141) and Research Foundation of XAUFE (15XCK14).